"Teacher,
which is the greatest commandment in the Law?"Jesus
replied: "'Love the Lord your God with all your
heart and with all your soul and with all your
mind.' This is the first and greatest
commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love
your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the
Prophets hang on these two commandments."
Matthew 22:36-40 (NIV)

Dear
John ,

Lent is a time for study and reflection
about the sacrifices Jesus made and how I can follow
his example. I find his central message both helpful
and quite challenging: that the most important thing
we can do as followers of Jesus is to love ourselves,
love our neighbor, and love God.

At this time
in our national politics, it seems as though loving
ourselves or loving our neighbor must come at some
cost. President Trump's executive order suspending
the refugee resettlement program and lowering the
number of refugees admitted to the U.S. suggests
that in order to live safely in our communities, we
must exclude and isolate all refugees. As
Rev. Canon Mark Stevenson put it, "This action
will be taken, we are told, to make us safe. Yet,
isolating ourselves from the world does not make us
safer; it only isolates us. Being afraid of those
who differ from us does not make us wise, or even
prudent; it only traps us in an echo chamber of
suspicion and anger, and stops us cold from loving
as Christ loved." When we pick one or the other, we
somehow lose out on fully loving God.

The reality is
that refugees are victims of persecution, and have
been forced to undertake a perilous journey in
seeking a better life for themselves and their
families. They bring with them incredible
determination and resilience. When we offer new life
and friendship to the people that are victims of
terror and persecution, our nation becomes stronger.
When we harness our values of defending freedom and
opportunity for all, we weaken the actors of
extremism that would say those values are
unachievable. And, of course, we come closer to
living out the love that Jesus calls us to.

Beyond those
values of refugee resettlement, examination of the
refugee resettlement process reveals a secure and
measured program that focuses on safety for refugees
and U.S. communities. Vetting for refugees is an
extreme and lengthy process that includes multiple
agency checks, medical screenings, and in person
interviews before admission to the U.S. Our national
security infrastructure is working just as it
should. The Cato Institute published a
helpful risk analysis and found "the chance of
an American being murdered in a terrorist attack
caused by a refugee is 1 in 3.64 billion per year
while the chance of being murdered in an attack
committed by an illegal immigrant is an astronomical
1 in 10.9 billion per year.... The hazards posed by
foreign-born terrorists are not large enough to
warrant extreme actions like a moratorium on all
immigration or tourism."

The kind of isolation that ignores these
realities and prioritizes self-protection at the cost
of protection for all is dangerous and pushes us away
from Jesus. As followers of Jesus, we are not engaged
in a zero sum game of life. In this season before
Easter, we are especially reminded that followers of
Jesus are not bound by fear. Rather, as followers of
Jesus we are each evangelists, pursuing a world based
in hope that works to reconcile all people to God and
thus to one another.

And that is
where following Jesus becomes challenging. When we
pursue a world of reconciliation, we remove
ourselves from the center of the equation. That is
not a simple task. The "greatest commandment in the
Law" is never easy. This Lent, as I draw closer to
Jesus, I
pray that I and those around me may begin this
process by being "mindful not only of our personal
need for repentance and renewal in doing the work of
God, but indeed of the need of all humanity to
repent of our indifference to the brokenness of our
relationships, to the suffering of millions of
people worldwide who are starving, oppressed,
enslaved, or seeking sanctuary even if it be in a
place far from their homeland."